User:Sir Robin
This is the user page of the brave Sir Robin
Hello! And bravely run away...[edit]
Hello! I've been using the Sir Robin moniker since I first played Ultima Underworld and noticed that one of the selectable player portraits was a red-haired man with a moustache. It reminded me of Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail so that's the name and portrait I've used ever since.
In the late 90s I was playing through again and I was dating a gal named Robin. She saw me name my character and thought I was making fun of her. I told her, no, that's what I always call my character in this game, but I'm not sure if she ever believed me.
Experience with Ultima[edit]
I know this wiki is a resource for mega-fans but the truth is I don't have much experience with the Ultimas.
Ultima 1?[edit]
The first Ulitma I tried to play I think was Ultima 1, maybe in the early-to-mid-80s, on Apple ][e. I remember thinking it was really cool how it came with a cloth map. But I didn't get into the game, I think I was just too young and not ready for it. My favorite game at the time was Cranston Manor, and I thought that game was really complex. It taught me typing and spelling and directions.
Ultima 3?[edit]
In the late 80s I had a neighbor and we'd take turns renting NES games from Blockbuster and playing them all weekend. Once we rented an Ultima, I'm guessing it was #3, and played it. I don't remember much about it, other than being annoyed that we could only save by paying to stay at an inn. I remember we got to a really hard part where we kept dying and having to to go back to the last inn and it was so far back. I don't think we ever finished that one.
Ultima Underworld[edit]
In the early 90s I downloaded a demo of this game off a BBS and it was called Wolenstein 3D. It was like nothing I had seen before, I could run around the levels in 3d (or what I thought at the time was 3d) blasting nazis. What's not to love? There was a guy at my school, he seemed to be into computers and video games, so I copied it to a disk and brought it to him. At he same time he gave me a disk of this game he just found that I had to try. I took it home and it was a demo of Ultima Underworld.
The game facinated me. It gave me a fully 3d world to explore with so many options. I could be friendly or hostile to NPCs, if I found a locked door I could go look for a key or just bash it down. And jumping puzzles, I'd played games like Super Mario Brothers, but lining up and landing a jump in 3d space was a whole new thing. And there wasn't any hand-holding either, it reminded me of one of my famorite games, NES Zelda. "Here kid, takes this sword, good luck!" That's how this game was, doesn't made you do anything, it just lets you go figure it out. I played that demo over and over, wanting to explore every little bit of the game, then finally got the full version. Wow, a whole 8 levels full stuff to explore, NPCs to talk to, baddies smash, etc.
Even after I finished it I played it again over and over, looking for new things to find or other ways to solve problems. I know the game pretty well by now, and every few years still take it out and play through it again, just because. In the 90s it wasn't hard, even under Windows 95/98. In the 2000s Windows NT/2000 were notoriously terrible at running DOS games. I started following a lot of the UW remake projects, waiting to see who was going to give me a playable version first. Eventually DosBox came out and made that point moot, but there's still a few projects under construction out there. Which one will finally bring us a modernized engine?
Ultima Underworld Technical[edit]
I never did much technical hacking of UW, I just played it straight. There was a player editor I found once. I'd use that to poke around in the game and see what I could do with it. Gameplay-wise, the most common thing I'd do is that once I reached level 7 and found the ring of levitation I'd hack it to be a ring of fly, because levitation was so slow and annoying.
My first rip[edit]
Somewhere around 2010 I saw a post from someone saying he knew someone who was making a blocky 3d dungeon crawler type of game in Java and the poster wanted to put UW1 textures into it. He had ripped the textures from the UW1 data files but they were really dark and weirdly colored. This interested me, as it could be a way to put UW1 into a modern engine, so I decided to see if I could help. I found a UW1 file formats document and tried ripping out the graphics myself. I found his errors - UW saves the graphics in 6 bits per channel (so 18-bit true color) so if you want to use it on a 24-bit true color graphic engines you have to scale the channels up. Also the channels were stored in a different order, I think BGR instead of RGB or something like that. Anyway I got the textures all ripped out and even did the sprites for items and monsters because I figured I'd need those at some point. That blocky 3d Java game engine was what became Minecraft, a fun game in it's own right, but it didn't have the features to recreate UW the way I'd want to.
Delver[edit]
I think it was about 2012 when Then I saw another blocky 3d dungeon crawler Java game in development. That one was called Delver. I started working on a mod to put UW graphics and levels and baddies into that game. I got pretty far into that and learned a lot about Java along the way, but never finished it.
GZDoom[edit]
Somewhere around 2021 I think it was I saw someone post the first level of UW as a level for Doom. It was ok, yeah the same rough shape as the UW level, but I thought it could be a lot better. So again I took all these graphics that I'd ripped from UW and figured out how to get them into Doom and how to make levels. Then I discovered the power of the GZDoom engine and started experimenting with making my own version of UW to run in that engine. I wanted to bring over all the features of UW but also had ideas for new things to add as well. Kind of like The Ultima 6 Project, or what I've read about it anyway, as I haven't played either U6 proper or U6 Project.
| GZDoomUW: My project to bring UW into the GZDoom engine |
Ultima Underworld Modern Hacks[edit]
In 2023 I saw that someone had made a mouselook mod for UW1 and UW2, so of course I played through them again. Then I found UW Portable, a project that took stock stock GOG UW1 and 2 and added the mouselook mod and a midi music mod and some other options. I had tried a few times to get the midi working on my own but it never did but this did work so I finally got to play with that. So of course I played through it again.
Then I saw someone had released an English translation patch for the Japanese Playstation 1 version of the game. That's a version I had never played. I'd started it a few times but never got through the Japanese interface. With the English patch I finally played through that version a few times. Since I've played the PC version so many times I'm very familiar with it and noticed a lot of changes in the PSX version.
Ultima Underworld II[edit]
So I've barely mentioned this one but yes I've played through it several times like I have UW1. It's superior in many ways - bigger viewport, digitals sounds, bigger sprites, more maps, more NPCs, more stories, more loots, more spells, etc - It's a great game and I've played it through many times, but it just didn't quite captare that same piece of my heart like UW1 did. I started a UW Portable playthrough of it in 2024 to give it a try with mouselook and midi, but haven't finsihed it yet. I've been distracted by UW1 PSX, Nightdive's remake of System Shock, and Barony, but I'll get to it.